Wednesday, 5 April 2017

SCARFE-FACED

A memorable day, yesterday, with David and I being invited to lunch at Sotheby's auction house in London to celebrate the sale (today) of an astonishing array of cartoons, caricatures and drawings....

The unmistakable work of the (truly) legendary artist and satirist, Gerald Scarfe...

Photo: David Weeks

We were in celebrated company: in addition to Gerald, his wife, Jane Asher, and their son, Frederick, there were – among others – Felicity Dahl (widow of Roald) and Donald Sturrock (Dahl's biographer) and sitting next to David (to his great delight) Nick Mason of Pink Floyd!

The sale features a staggering range of Scarfe's work including many delicious inky assassinations. Here are Thatcher, Blair and Obama...

Also for sale are examples of Gerald Scarfe work for the theatre: McHeath in The Beggar's Opera and a costume designs for Drosselmeyer in the ballet, The Nutcracker and for the title-character of the operatic version of Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr Fox...

And, of course, Scarfe's work on two memorable – vastly different – film projects: Pink Floyd – The Wall and Disney's Hercules...

On a wall by itself in the pre-sale exhibition (and in a class-act all of its own) hung one of Gerald Scarfe's most celebrated – and, at the time, notorious – portraits.

In 1964, The Times commissioned the artist to mark Winston Churchill's final day in the House of Commons, but the submitted picture was deemed too controversial to publish.

The drawings is an extraordinary piece of work: the pathetic, decaying, sunken-eyed Churchill dominates the meticulously drawn architectural setting with Conservative politicians (including Reginald Maudling and Alec Douglas-Home) peeping out from behind his hunched bulk and the Speaker of the Commons, Sir Harry Hylton-Foster, lurking in the shadowy recess of the Speaker's Chair.

Six months later, when Churchill died, Peter Cook used the drawing on the cover of the satiric magazine, Private Eye...

Bidding opens on this piece of British national (and cartoon) history at £100,000...